Minneapolis artist Anders Nilsen tells a multimedia story of illness, death and true love.

Ari Shaffir’s rebellion against his parents’ orthodoxy gave him the opportunity to spin his dissatisfaction and repression into comic gold.

“Dirty Baby,” the offspring of a Wilco guitarist, a poet and an iconic pop artist strives to be a “loveable mutt” of a performance — not some purebred golden retriever.

Arnold Leonard helped save a beluga whale, one of the many stories he recounts in his book of medical history, “Through the Portals of Pigs and Manure.”